jQuery 1.4 Reference Guide By Karl Swedberg And Jonathan Chaffer

If you're a web developer, chances are good that you are building your web applications using the jQuery Javascript library. And, if you're doing that, chances are, you're loving it; jQuery's appeal comes from, in no small part, that fact that it provides a tremendous amount of power with a very small, very manageable API. And, while this is obviously a good thing, jQuery's ease of use can quickly allow us to become complacent in our learning. The jQuery development team is constantly making improvements to the library and it is important that we try to keep up with all the advancements such that we can leverage them to our benefit. Unfortunately, sometimes that means we have to Read The Manual (RTM).

Luckily, with books like the jQuery 1.4 Reference Guide by Karl Swedberg and Jonathan Chaffer, reading the manual is not a bad thing. I had the opportunity to read this book over the weekend and it does a great job of outlining the entire jQuery API. I'm a slow reader and I was able to make it through this book in about 6 to 7 hours. But, make no mistake about it - it's a reference guide, not a learning manual; it does have code samples, but they go only slightly farther than what is required to demonstrate the given API method. For a more real-world, task-oriented exploration, you might want to check out Karl and Jonathan's other book, Learning jQuery 1.3.

I think the chairs are all from Staples. Although, I have an Aeron chair that I inherited from my dad :)

@Raymond,

Agreed - Learning jQuery is a great book.

NOTE: Just so there is no confusion here, this book is a reference manual; it is basically an offline version of the documentation. ... I just talked about this with someone and wanted to make sure this was clear.

Sorry about the late reply. We don't have any immediate plans for another edition of Learning jQuery, though I'm sure it'll happen at some point. Because it's more of a tutorial-style book, Learning jQuery 1.3 is less time sensitive than the Reference Guide is. Nearly everything in there is still relevant and useful, even if new features in jQuery 1.4 have made some of the tasks a bit simpler to achieve.

I'll second that - what was so great to me about the Learning jQuery book was that it definitely showed me a new way to think and to approach my code; this, in and of itself, is version-independent for the most part.

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